1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to touchscreen devices, and more particularly, to rendering advertisements on touchscreen devices using elements of existing/preloaded graphic user interfaces (GUIs).
2. Description of the Related Art
An existing market of advertisement on touchscreen devices (i.e. mobile devices, smartphones, desktop, netbook, laptop, TV-set, game console, etc.) has been basically formed by application of the technologies and principles of advertising used on PCs and notebooks to mobile platforms. However, the effectiveness of advertising on mobile devices is significantly lower compared to advertising on PCs.
Mobile device users typically run special thin applications instead of heavy-footprint conventional browsers that take up a lot of system resources. Thus, mobile users do not use conventional searches nearly as often as PC users. Accordingly, the most popular means of monetization on mobile devices are advertisement banners and applications integrated into web resources.
The banners are small ads that take up portions of a mobile device screen, which is typically quite small. Because the banners are also very small, they contain very basic advertisement data (i.e., a short text). These basic ads mostly irritate the users and do not attract attention or spark user interest.
The most commonly used method for mobile advertising is using the ads, along with free applications that carry, i.e., ads that are essentially forced upon users, who download a free application or a game. These ads do generate some small profits due to growth of the mobile device market, but in general are also ineffective.
The conventional mobile device advertising banners take up a large portion of an already small screen and irritate a user. Furthermore, the ad banners often appear within an application or a game. The user is focused on the application or the game and pays very little attention to the ads. So these advertisements often distract the user and, in essence, act as anti-advertisements.
All of the conventional mobile advertisement systems such as Google AdMob employ the above described forced ads. In other words, the advertisement systems are “Blind Networks” that render ads without much concern for its audience. In some implementations, these networks collect and analyze user personal and/or geolocation data and act as “Targeted Networks”, which also has proven to be ineffective on mobile platforms.
Accordingly, a method for rendering ads on mobile devices, which takes into consideration the small screen size, is desired.